For traditional Southerners today (and especially for those haggard souls who have somehow managed to remain unreconstructed through it all), the flag that so many of our ancestors fought and died under defending a foreign invasion is not something to be tossed aside.
Every society has its hypocrites, since most of us, to secure what we want, will sometimes pretend to be better than we are, but the Greeks were generally frank about everyday realities. Dr. Johnson was being very Greek when he told Boswell that “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.”
The “liberal arts” have come to mean the arts that turn students into liberals.
Thomas Fleming begins a podcast series in which the main themes of his first book are explored in a more conversational tone. In this 29 minute podcast he and Rex take up the origin of the book and the great fallacy that underlies almost all modern isms and ologies.
Gustav Mahler once said that if the public thinks a conductor’s tempo too slow, what he ought to do is to slow it down. Such, anyway, is Wednesday’s Child’s feeble justification for persisting with the theme of the past two weeks, which is the plight of the socially anomalous child East and West. The occlusive membrane separating the home from the state, if one exists and is not ruptured by intrusion of the latter, is in most cases a good thing, indeed one of the condiciones sine quibus non of child rearing. But then, of course, there are cases when...
When over a year ago now I wrote on: “A Nest of Swamp Rats,” I treated the leading actors in the pursuit of the Democrats’ Russian hoax as exemplars of institutional or bureaucratic mediocrity, of opportunism, arrogance, and stupidity. Apart from a mention of John Brennan’s youthful Communism, I credited none of them with anything as risky as thinking.
The family is not the only natural social institution that is being undermined by the modern state. Men are by nature competitive, and they created war and games, politics and the marketplace, to satisfy their need to contend for status, wealth and power. One of leftism’s greatest successes has been to adopt the social language of Christianity and to transfer it from enclosed households (which are naturally communal and socialist) to the open fields where men do battle with each other. This is a point I made briefly in The Morality of Everyday Life and which has been expanded...
I’m often told that people “didn’t know what they voted for,” or were “stupid,” or are, “as everyone knows, racist.” Fascinatingly, as far as I know, stupid people, racist people, and even people who are lied to get equal votes in a democracy.
President Trump’s opponents in the military are using the classic language of military strongmen who overthrow republican government.
My second law of presidential elections is that the best liar wins (usually). This law goes a long way toward explaining why it took so long for the result of the 2000 election to be declared: Both parties were working round the clock, not only in the lower courts but also in the ultimate TV court of appeal, to spin flax into flannel. In this never-ending period of what everyone seems to be calling a political crisis, no one is willing to talk about the underlying problems which have nothing to do with the electoral college or voting machines but with the basic legitimacy–or rather the lack thereof–of the American regime.
